e One does have alot of time thinking when biking. First hour today was not much thinking else than pedaling and getting up that hill. Yesterday I had decided to bike east of Vättern (a lake) but before I went to sleep I changed my mind and decided on taking the same road as last time, west of Vättern. Up, up, up. But since I was refreshed after yesterday’s rest it was ok. The downhill afterwards was wonderful. Thinking was it. So here it is, today’s thinking, “Five thoughts about speed”:

When men do not have a roof over their head in a car their common sense just fly off. Put a man in a cab and he drives 1. too fast and 2. too close. I have carefully studied this empirically during the past four biking days.

What does a car do that meets another car right when they are going to pass me? Slow down? No, if a car cannot go out and keep the distance to me as a cyclist it tends to speed up instead. Is it to pass faster or what? Needs some serious thinking.

Tail wind increases the speed! I like! Today the weather was exactly as I wished for before the trip. Not too warm, mostly cloudy and a tail wind. It does not get any better!

But on the other hand I am surprisingly unconcerned about the speed. I pedal on and sometime it goes fast and sometime slow. If the average speed is 17 or 19 or 23 km/h it does not matter to me. The thing is that I do get to where I am going before 3 pm anyway and I have all the time in the afternoon to rest, blog or doing nothing at all. No stress anywhere so why stress on the bike?

Too high speed is scary. If I dare to let go of the break it have to be straight and I need to see what is coming. Maximum speed today was 45 km/h (28 mph) in a nice downhill. If I put this into perspective I checked out the biking race of Tour de France and so far, after almost 1000 km of biking they are on an average speed of 43 km/h (27 mph).